Monday, June 13, 2016

James Mangold’s
career path seems clear – every film he directs is less interesting than the
one before: Heavy, Copland, Girl
Interrupted, Kate and Leopold and now Identity.
If you looked at those five films, and didn’t know who made them, I doubt you’d
ever suspect a connection – it’s a true challenge for the auteur theory. But
the last two films have at least one obvious thing in common: the guy seems too
good for this material.

Identity

Kate and Leopold – the Meg Ryan/Hugh Jackman comedy about a
nobleman who’s transported from the last century into modern-day Manhattan –
sums it up. The premise is obviously dumb, but if you get past that, it allows
a swooning feminine fantasy about old-fashioned love – about men who cook
dinner for you and respect your honour and who are so attractive that no one
would question your giving it all up for them. Jackman was up to the task of
embodying all this, but the movie always seemed to be holding back, to be
dawdling, fussing over practicalities. OK, Max Ophuls isn’t around anymore, but
still, how could you give a movie like that to an essentially rational director
– one who’s never shown any sign of losing his head?

Identity raises a similar issue of directorial miscasting. It’s a nutty,
overweight movie that might have paid off if a passionate flake had made it.
It’s a dark and stormy night, and a motley group of strangers ends up at a
low-grade hotel. One of them gets knocked off, then another. It seems clear who
the culprit is, but then he’s killed too. And then they start to die in ways
that no one could possibly have planned…

At this point I was
genuinely intrigued by the movie, because I couldn’t imagine how it’d ever
explain all this. Well, I won’t give away the surprise, but suffice to say it’s
a big cheat – a variation on the “it was all a dream” technique of stepping
outside the plot and redefining the parameters of everything you’ve been
watching. Yes, another one of those.

Meta movies

You can’t get away
from these movies now: The Matrix
(the apex of the form), Open your Eyes
and its remake Vanilla Sky, The Others.
M. Night Shyamalan seems to be building an entire career on such films. I
bought into the admiration for The Sixth
Sense. But Unbreakable was
severely silly, and Signs was an
exercise of such pretentious self-regard that I actually ended up actively
hating the director for a while. And yet, plenty of people thought it a great
movie, even an important one.

Given the sheer volumes,
there must be something about these times that makes such devices particularly
appealing and resonant. Maybe it’s the natural expression of spiritual beliefs
in an age when organized religion is generally less appealing – just the idea
of there being something beyond all
this is so necessary that it barely matters what that something is. Maybe it’s
a reflection of our ironic distance and self-reflection – we’re so distrusting
of the surface of anything that we’re suckers for anarchic reinterpretation.
Maybe it’s a measure of a spreading dissociative quality in our thinking.
Intellectual pursuits are for the elite, so let them sweat away at the linear narratives; let them struggle over
their psychological motivations and thematic structures – the rest of us zigzag
and bop and weave.

The Matrix supported all of those explanations, and others, and the coming
sequels will probably extend its scope further. But Identity has nothing beyond the thing itself. It’s inept as drama,
because once the revelation has been logged, there’s no possible reason to care
about some of the remaining plot strands. And like many of its cousins, the revelation
hardly amounts to anything more than bookkeeping. So now we know the secret –
and the way that’s enriched our lives from where we were two hours earlier
is…what?

Confidence

Opening the same day
as Identity, James Foley’s Confidence represents a more earthbound
paradigm. Edward Burns plays a con man who puts together a big job for local
crime boss Dustin Hoffman; Andy Garcia and Rachel Weisz are in the cast too. No
less than Identity, the movie has
twists and turns and people not being who you thought they were and events not
being what they seem. The difference is that in Confidence, this is nothing to do with other levels of reality or
suchlike – it’s all a reflection of master con men at work.

Although this is a
more organic form of plotting, such moves generally end up seeming just about
as abstract as the likes of Identity.
The con always proceeds more impeccably than anything you ever observe in the
real world. The con artist perfectly anticipates his victims’ reactions – even
when they think they’ve got the upper hand on him, they’re mainly playing out a
narrative that will ultimately lead right where he wants it. It’s an inherently
cold, dehumanizing genre – Ocean’s
Eleven, a recent exemplar, might be the least viscerally engaging hit movie
of the last few years.

Ironically (or
perhaps necessarily), the genre is populated by colourful characters – Hoffman
in Confidence being the latest
addition to the gallery of eccentric rogues. These people often seem too
volatile and impulsive to justify the con artist’s confidence in how they’ll
behave. Confidence seems to delight
in human diversity and possibility on one level, but in substance it oozes
contempt, because no matter who they are, whatever their achievements and
possibilities are, they’ll always end up right where the artist wants them.

That’s not a bad
metaphor for a certain deterministic view of the world, of course. David Mamet,
no intellectual lightweight, keeps returning to such material, yet each of his
efforts in the genre seems less like his work than the last. I think directors
frequently imagine they can transcend the form, only to find the structure
heavier than they’d anticipated. Neil Jordan, in the recent The Good Thief, did fairly well at
avoiding this trap, although his movie seemed to me less distinctive than it
did to others.

Still, Confidence is probably a better film
than Identity overall. Foley (who
also directed Glengarry Glen Ross) is
a pro director. The film requires a certain volume of flashbacks and other
trickery, but it avoids the visual gimmickry that overwhelms Mangold.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

I like the idea of
taking the elements of low comedy – toilet humour, doubles entendres, and so
forth – and raising them to the level of art. In recent years, the Farrelly
brothers attracted a fair bit of critical approval, particularly for There’s Something About Mary (I didn’t
get it). And some serious critics held American
Pie in very high regard (I can just about see that). But if you really want
to talk about this, I’d start with Blake Edwards. At one time, I thought
Edwards was one of the best American directors of his time. Nowadays, I’d say
he’s better than most people realize, but that isn’t quite the same thing. Most
people acknowledge the gentle charm of Breakfast
at Tiffany’s or the surprising rawness of Days of Wine and Roses. And the Pink
Panther movies were big business in their day, although I’m not sure they
got enough attention for their formal rigour – a quality which admittedly fell
off sharply later in the series.

Blake Edwards

Remember how, after
Peter Sellers died, Edwards put together a whole film (Trail of the Pink Panther) out of discarded material and new
linking bits, after which he made Curse
of… with a new lead character, and later again Son of… with Roberto Benigni. Some see this as merely desperate,
but it seems to me to go beyond that, into what might be regarded as a
pseudo-scientific examination of
desperation, of the repetition and patterning that’s always marked his comedy.
But I acknowledge that I could be giving him too much credit here – after all,
at the same (declining) stage in his career, he recycled Victor/Victoria into a not-particularly-successful Broadway
musical.

His two masterpieces
(OK, that’s a relative term too) are 10
and S.O.B., two brittle and often
bitter examinations of aging in Hollywood. In Bo Derek, 10 had Edwards’ best ever gimmick, and Dudley Moore temporarily
caught the popular imagination, but the movie is consistently rueful, if not
depressing, and it captures a certain type of self-indulgent maleness very
well. S.O.B. was ever darker –
notionally a wacky farce, populated almost entirely by old, unhappy people.
Julie Andrews baring her breasts provided another (although not quite as
compelling) audience-grabber, but the heart of the film was William Holden as a
director who’d sold his soul almost completely, and yet managed to retain a
notion of gritty integrity that somehow hung intact through the movie. It’s yet
another wonderful Edwards ambiguity – almost the ultimate biting of the hand
that fed him.

Peter Segal,
director of the new comedy Anger
Management, is no Blake Edwards. Specifically, his film has no visual style
at all, and no attitude. And very few good lines. I think I only laughed at
some silly euphemisms for sexual activity, but that just tells you something
about me. This is a typically ill-considered, barely controlled Hollywood
package, seemingly built around a single concept: that Adam Sandler and Jack
Nicholson would be in the same movie. Which is not a bad concept, but it
doesn’t take you very far either.

Anger Management

The surprise is that
much of the movie’s interest would come not from Nicholson, but from Sandler.
But to address Nicholson first – the movie is obviously a conscious relaxation
for him, after The Pledge and About Schmidt. Critics praised him
(excessively, in my view) for how he kept his usual mannerisms under wraps in Schmidt, but here he lets them all
tumble out. You name your favourite Nicholson moment – it’s evoked here at some
point. Somehow it all manages to seem more weighty and respectable than Robert
de Niro’s recent exercises in self-parody, but that’s yet another relative
assessment. Presumably the whole thing carries the significance for Nicholson
of a trip to the Oscars; sprawled out in his front row seat, mugging for the
camera and getting treated like a king.

It’s hard to think
of an actor being handed a greater gift than Sandler was with Paul Thomas
Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. The
movie had almost no purpose other than to rehabilitate Sandler; to show how his
shtick masked his warmth and complexity. The whole movie, more or less, served
as a visualization of Sandler’s passive-aggressive confusion. At the time, I
didn’t really know what to make of it – it was obviously accomplished, but on
some level seemed just nutty.

But now, Anger Management finally proves the
success of Anderson’s film, because Sandler just doesn’t seem the same to me
anymore. He plays a nervous executive assistant, put-upon and under-rewarded at
work, stifled in his relationship with girlfriend Marisa Tomei by various
hang-ups. A stupid misunderstanding with a flight attendant gets him sentenced
to anger management therapy. Nicholson plays the doctor who, of course, is
crazier than the patient. He leads Sandler through various supposedly
therapeutic misadventures, winding up with a splashy finale in Yankee Stadium
(with guest star Rudolph Giuliani).

Saved by Sandler

The joke is that
Sandler doesn’t need anger management, but he sure needs something. Nicholson’s
misaligned treatments, stamping all over every aspect of Sandler’s life, only
makes him angrier, thus prolonging the sentence and digging him a deeper hole.
It’s a conventional tale of escalating disaster, but Sandler never seemed to me
like merely the suffering fool. He avoids the over the top outbursts of his
pre-Punch Drunk persona, all but
embodying the straight man to Nicholson’s antics. The much remarked upon
“sweetness” of Anderson’s film is back too. But most interesting is the
ambiguity he projects regarding his true mental state – a quality that
frequently suggests there’s more to the movie than meets the eye.

As it turns out,
there sort of is – an ending that attempts to put another twist on everything
we’ve seen. It’s utterly feeble – the ultimate proof of the film’s vacuousness.
The only other thing of interest is the movie’s faint attempt to tap into
contemporary paranoia – it has a few references to these being “difficult
times,” and the Yankee Stadium climax, with that guest star, certainly comes
across as an exercise in reassurance. The movie could easily have extended this
line of inquiry, setting up Sandler as a funnel for contemporary jitteriness,
but that’s more than it has in mind.

In fact, the film’s
ultimately the most complacent kind of backslap to the audience – the kind of
movie that assumes that if the cast is having fun, then so will we. Another
assumption it makes: there can’t be any better entertainment than watching
celebrities goofing around, so just about every supporting role is filled by a
“name” – Heather Graham, Woody Harrelson, John Turturro. It’s like watching a
particularly demeaning episode of Celebrity
Fear Factor.

Still, it’s the kind
of movie that at least has interesting flaws, and then there’s Sandler. It’s
maybe a quarter of the way to being an intelligent dumb comedy.

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Three new movies to
write about this week, all exciting prospects that turned out to be
disappointments.

Assassination Tango

Robert Duvall wrote
and directed Assassination Tango, and
stars in it as a New York hit man sent on a job to Argentina. Cooling his heels
for a few weeks, he becomes enchanted by the local tango bars, especially a
young dancer played by Luciana Pedrazi, who is Duvall’s offscreen girlfriend.
This is just one of the ways in which the film seems like a vanity project.
Duvall’s last film behind the camera, The
Apostle, was rambling and untidy, but had a persuasive sense of
sociological investigation mixed in with some genuine mystery. Assassination Tango employs the same
semi-documentary feel, but the film has nothing to reveal – it’s not scrupulous
enough to tell us very much about the tango, and the surrounding plot is just
run of the mill. Duvall himself gives a self-indulgent, off-putting
performance, apparently trying to evoke a John Cassavetes-like volatility.
Indeed, this film has been compared in some quarters to Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Well, Cassavetes’ name still seems to
crop up regularly as a reference point in movie reviews, and the best I can say
is – I can recall occasions when the comparison was even less justified than it
is here. But not by a whole lot.

In Lisa Cholodenko’s
Laurel Canyon, Frances McDormand
plays a free-spirited LA record producer whose buttoned-up son (Christian Bale)
comes to stay for a while with his scholarly girlfriend (Kate Beckinsale).
While Bale’s at work in a local hospital, Beckinsale tries to stay in her room
and work on her dissertation, but gradually spends more and more time hanging
out downstairs, where McDormand and her much younger rock musician lover are
making an album (or, just as often, doing the sex and drugs thing). I’m not
sure the general theme – reversal of generational expectations – is so far
removed from an episode of Family Ties;
the movie certainly consistently fails to establish much distinctive territory
for itself.

Laurel Canyon

In the weeks before
its release, I kept running into profiles of Frances McDormand (including in
such prestigious publications as The New
Yorker and New York Times Magazine),
all of which made a lot out of her topless scenes in Laurel Canyon, and of the general notion of this respected
middle-aged actress playing a loose hippie type. Predictably, she’s been
singled out for praise in every review of the film. But it seems to me by now
that this is basically what McDormand does, just like Clint Eastwood does what
he does. With her mix of flintiness, relish, vulnerability, engagement,
provocation, not-too-obvious sexiness – she almost embodies what most critics
look for in a movie. The ultimate symbol of this is that Joel Coen, half of
perhaps the most critically admired post-Scorsese filmmaking team, fell in love
with McDormand and married her.

Anyway, I can’t see
that McDormand does anything very interesting in the movie, which may be a
happy impression if it means we’re now past the point where the idea of
middle-aged sexuality is inherently fascinating. I was more intrigued by
Natascha McElhone, who plays a colleague of Bale’s at the hospital. McElhone’s
wide eyes and broad features verge of caricature (although I’m not sure of
what) and in this film she adopts a foreign accent (Israeli, I think she said)
that makes her seem even more disconnected from reality. But she and Bale have
a long conversation in a parking lot that’s sexy, unexpected, and astonishing
in its range of moods and implications. For at least that long, Cholodenko
seems to be tapping into a potentially rich vein. But then it’s back to more
dreary late night stuff in hotel rooms, and the movie just trails away,
although it does have a moderately diverting final scene.

Talking of dreary
late night stuff, this year’s Oscars were surprisingly un-dreary, and didn’t
even run that late. More importantly, the list of winners was too good to be
imaginable: Roman Polanski, Adrien Brody, Pedro Almodovar, Bowling for Columbine, Spirited Away, Eminem’s win for best song.
These all seemed to assert the ascendancy of a new majority far less likely to
be swayed by the mediocre calculations and prejudices that we’re told habitually
influence the results of these things. (By the way, I came out on top of my
office pool again, although only in a year of so many surprises could 6 out of
12 have been a winning score).

A few categories
slightly failed to keep pace with the wave of change, such as the best picture
Oscar for Chicago and the foreign
language film award to Nowhere in Africa.
I doubt whether anyone thinks this German entry is truly the best of the year,
but the convoluted process for determining the nominees doesn’t always allow
quality to rise to the top. Nowhere in
Africa may have been a respectable choice from among the five nominees they
ended up with. That aside though, it’s a safe middlebrow kind of movie.

Nowhere in Africa

It’s a cousin to
Polanski’s The Pianist in that it
depicts a Jewish family (husband and wife and young daughter) that takes a
route to survival (to Kenya), and the portrayal of their struggle seeks to
inform our perspective on the Holocaust. In this case though, the film’s
situation is more self-contained; the horrors in Europe occasionally intrude,
but for the most part you watch the movie as an extended anecdote that could be
taking place almost any time. Of course, this is partly the point, to convey
Africa’s unique identity – and the film does that quite well. But that’s not a
particularly bracing artistic achievement.

The film’s most
intriguing element is the portrayal of the mother, initially a reluctant
visitor to Africa, who quickly tires of her husband, has at least one affair,
is seen lustily initiating sex on several occasions, and in the end grows to
love the country more than he does. She’s the only character who seems to spill
beyond the frame.

Unfortunately, the
film is told primarily through the girl’s eyes, and thus generally follows a
simpler course, missing potential themes all over the place. For example, it
makes little of the fact that these refugees, with no experience working the
land, can fairly easily find a job as farm supervisors, to be addressed as “bwana”
and lord it over dozens of locals. I’m not saying the film specifically needed
to be anti-colonial, but it’s hard now to watch a work about Africa’s past that
appears to lack awareness of its present.

And then I saw Neil Jordan’s
The Good Thief, and I was
disappointed in that too. Maybe it’s not them – maybe it’s me. Well, I don’t
really think so…

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).